


Into the Void

by Broken_Clover



Category: Guilty Gear
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Psychological Horror, Reality Warping, Surreal, Technobabble, Unhappy Ending, Weirdness, eldritch horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:27:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27114676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Broken_Clover/pseuds/Broken_Clover
Summary: Dr. Faust has a non-Euclidean adventure.
Kudos: 7





	Into the Void

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this started off funny, at least.
> 
> I tried to make stuff with the Backyard and information density at least somewhat legible but to be fair even in canon it's absurdly confusing.
> 
> Also I apologize if this got too purple prose-y, I was trying to write from Faust's POV and that ended up being a bit all over the place.

_You could have prevented this, you know._

_“S-stop this! Put me down!”_

_You really don’t have anyone else to blame this on. After all, we had a contract, and you’re the one who broke it._

_“Where are you going?! Where do you think you’re taking me?!”_

_An exchange of services. Exchanging things of value. I can’t hold up my bargain unless you do the same._

_“Say something, damn it! And put me down!”_

_And if I didn’t have my deal fulfilled, there’s a debt to be repaid, no? Punitive damages, and all that._

_“I’ll kill you! I swear I’ll kill you! I-”_

_It might not be money, but this is much more valuable to me. Funnier, too._

_“What is that thing?!”_

_You’re really not the genius you think you are. There’s so many nuances to the Backyard you still don’t know about. Overlaps. Holes. Caches of jagged, raw data just sitting around, accumulating in the gaps. Junk data, of course, the universe is mostly filler. Wasteful material that serves no purpose._

_It’ll suit you quite perfectly._

_“You wanted to be ‘put down,’ Bedman?”_

_“W-wh- no, don’t- !”_

_“BECAUSE IT’S A LONG WAY DOWN FROM HERE!”_

++++++

Doctor Faust had a nose for trouble. Quite literally. Dimension-manipulating magic manifested in a lot of bizarre ways, he’d been told, so that was only so surprising. Magic had smells to it, a synesthetic symphony of scent he could pick up on like a bloodhound. Electricity with its lemongrass-and-coffee aroma, or fire with its sulphuric-and-vanilla odors. Teleportation magic, too, had its own smell to it. Faust was well acquainted with the honey-toasted *ping!* of his own dimensional doors, but other’s signatures could still surprise him. He didn’t really know what influenced it, aside from everything. Magical information density, focus, personality, the kind of shoes they were wearing that day-

Another wave of that detergent-and-iron smell distracted Faust from his own zigzagging thoughts. Ah, yes, that. Nose for trouble. So what exactly was this odd new scent? He’d never encountered it before. A bit dense, tangy, slightly unnerving. It reminded him too much of his days as a medical resident, spending nights in the hospital basement washing bloodstained blankets for use the next day. He couldn’t have been imagining it, could he?

He scuttered off into the nearest underbrush. Things had finally calmed with the Universal Will in custody, Faust had almost gone a whole six hours without anything odd happening! Enough to drive a man mad with boredom! So if anything, he welcomed this odd newness, whatever it was.

Faust definitely noticed the shifts in information density as they arrived. The gradual waves usually came and went without much fanfare, but this was less like a gentle tide and more of a panicked storm. For a moment, he feared that somehow, there was another information explosion imminent, but that couldn’t be right. The information flares were sudden, sure, but there was a way the energy swelled, constantly piling on itself. Here, it jumped and skipped and dropped without any rhythm he could follow. The on-and-off pressure from the spikes was already well on its way to giving him a migraine. If this was supposed to be an explosion, he half expected it to have already collapsed into a feeble pile of petering frequencies.

“Hmm...well, that isn’t supposed to happen.”

It was supposed to be a tree, he could only assume, but trees didn’t normally look so...jagged? Warped? Non-Euclidean? If it was a large bonsai, it was impressive work, but it didn’t explain how a full-sized tree could have a trunk that zigzagged back and forth, with branches that almost appeared to float. Faust had to touch one of the jagged curves, just to make sure his eyes weren’t making him see impossible things. Faust knew quite a bit about impossible things, yes he did, but this was new.

The more he traveled, the more he realized that peculiar tree wasn’t a fluke. The ones past it warped and bent in equally- and even more confusing ways. Diagonal, stretched-too-far, inexplicably floating trunks, no trunk at all, just hovering branches. Was this frightening? He found it fascinating, but he knew he was more inclined to the brain-shatteringly eldritch than most people he knew. Mainly, he was just baffled by what had caused it. Everything up until then had been perfectly fine, beyond that information threshold it seemed the laws of physics had decided to take a vacation for the time being.

A sudden spike of information had him pressing a hand to his temples. That felt even more apt as he watched a nearby tree shiver and warp with it. While it wasn’t especially normal to begin with, he watched the almost childishly simple cylinders and cones flicker haphazardly into something resembling an actual tree, only for the branches to blink off into empty air nearby. The left-behind trunk wobbled like any solid object really shouldn’t, finally settling in another one of those odd, asymmetrical zigzags. At the base of it, a perfect square of grass suddenly blinked out of existence, leaving something unnatural and colorless, perfectly smooth.

Faust nodded to himself. “Ah...there’s the trouble spot!”

A gouge of some sort, ripping right through the sky. The edges of it were invisibly thin but unbelievably sharp, and he had to duck to avoid lopping his own head clean off. Rather rude of it, but if standard physics didn’t apply, he could only assume manners didn’t, either. Summoning magic, really any sort of interdimensional space was usually made with smooth, concise edges. The pleasant four sides of his door, of course, or the cyclical gentleness of a summoning ring. To be fair, summons took effort, and a human mind had an easier time conceptualizing and manifesting a simple shape than wasting mental energy imagining every detail of an asymmetrical one. What Faust was staring at was like a tear in fabric, unapologetically, bafflingly, frustratingly organic. 

A deer meandered through the field, simpleminded enough that it didn’t notice the fact that if Faust moved a half-step to the left, the animal suddenly had three heads, and if he moved a half-step to the right, more legs than one could ever need. The doctor decided he would be polite and stay where he was. Even he couldn’t imagine finding a use for three heads.

So this interesting little cleft in reality was causing all this. It seemed like a waste of perfectly good trees, but what did he know. Aside from the fact that trees didn’t normally fold out on themselves….and then in...out...in...out...goodness, it was almost hypnotic to look at it. 

Faust tried not to stare too long. He bent under the main part of the rift, trying to get a better look. Dense waves of pure information poured out of it like a gushing spigot. Definitely a Backyard signature. There were places where the barriers between the two world thinned, and they scraped by one another at low tide, but that was typically only enough to startle a passerby, or to leave a peculiar memento in the real world that was unsettling, but inexplicable and individualized enough people could pass it off as a hoax or an obscene freak of nature. They weren’t supposed to flow so freely, and for so long- the thing had no indication it was scabbing over and closing up like a wound should, only dumping more information out.

Well, Faust _was_ a doctor, and if there was a wound in need of fixing, he was the man for the job!

The deer bent down to gnaw at the grass, then bent down to gnaw at the grass, then bent down to. Its teeth clipped right through the greenery before they promptly all fell out.

He picked up Margherita and flipped her around, using the blunt end to poke inside the rip and feel around. If the perforation wasn’t closing on its own, then the possibility stood to reason that something must have been clogging it and keeping it pried open (then again, as he’d already considered, reason and manners didn’t seem especially common here. Perhaps it was simply a very rude hole, that enjoyed making people’s lives difficult).

It sort of felt like running his scalpel through very, very thick soup. The Backyard was pure information, he could only guess how solid it truly was, but this was still annoying. Faust paused for a moment to scuff his shoe in the grass until it stopped being a brown rectangle with black circles on it and looked more like any half-decent foot should.

Margherita clanged off something abnormally solid in the information soup. Aha! There was the meat. He jabbed at it a few times to try and dislodge it from whatever it had been stuck on. Just his luck, all this trouble really was caused by a chunk of petulant debris. Perhaps it wasn’t all bad. He could use whatever it was as a new decoration for his office! If he could flatten out the hyperbolic plane and let the edges fold on themselves, he was sure it would make for an excellent conversation piece!

The object of his troubles sloughed out of the tear and hit the ground with a thump. From his pocket, Faust pulled a very large clothing zipper, which he hooked into the sides of the hole. With one clean motion, he pulled the edges together until the zipper fell back into his hands.

“Aha! Treatment complete.” He flicked off a few stray threads of information that still clung to Margherita, watching them thin out and flatten into reality. Most of it junk data, same as how most of the air people breathed was actually carbon dioxide. Harmless in careful doses, barely noticeable

“Now you’ve caused me an awful lot of trou- ! Oh, boy…”

Did he recognize this individual? Did he know many people with two-and-a-half faces? Faust titled his head. Ah! Just some leftover warping, only one face. Well, ah, most of one.

Cubes of flesh- literal cubes, angular lines marked into the skin with eerily perfect accuracy- were missing from their legs. The upper half managed a bit better, though the missing chunks took with it several fingers and a hunk of the face. Terribly intrigued, Faust couldn’t help but lean in closer. It didn’t bleed. None of it. The muscles and bones simply...weren’t there. Nothing but black, like the body itself didn’t know something was supposed to be in that spot, and it was safer to leave it empty.

Something strange and…pink was wedged into the border where the face simply _stopped._ Faust gave it a prod. He watched a solid shape ooze out of equally-solid flesh and clip back into reality, briefly, before snapping back to where it had been.

Stubborn thing. It really _was_ rude.

The second time, he gave it a tug. The weird shape reacted again, but far less pleasantly than the last time. Before he could blink, it shot right out of its space as though it were a cannonball, and with the short space between them it meant that the only place it could go was wedged several centimeters right into Faust’s own forehead.

“Ow!” He said, more reprimanding than anything else. “No stabbing!”

Should that have killed him? He really didn’t feel like it today. Maybe next time, he was too busy. Faust plucked it out, his head rebounding like a rubber ball as he looked over the projectile. Pink, pink, he knew this shade of pink, it was warped by the density but if he had to venture a guess, he could only assume it had once been an arrow.

Arrow? Arrow...it seemed familiar, but he couldn’t put a name to it. Bah! He was always so terrible with faces.

Faust noticed that the eye was still moving, reeling about in its socket and staring up at him with frightened uncertainty. Was this not their natural state? It didn’t look like a person, but Faust had no indication he was looking at a person at all. After all, it had come from the Backyard. Trying to put a human in the Backyard and have them not be eviscerated was about as successful as mint-flavored orange juice (Well, _he_ thought it was a good idea).

“This is a peculiar scenario we’ve found ourselves in, my friend!” He said, crouching down. “Don’t suppose you could tell me how this happened?”

The noise that managed to come out of their half-mouth was staticky, incomprehensible, and very loud. The sudden shrillness of it knocked Faust right over, and he had to sit in place for a minute covering his ears.

“Hmm. Don’t do that.”

Well, if a patient couldn’t describe their own symptoms, a doctor needed to be a good analyst. Faust pulled on a pair of gloves and tried to think of a good way to go about the process. He still couldn’t figure out what those black cutoffs were or what they did. Giving it a poke seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea.

Something spidered onto his hand as soon as it connected. The sharp pain came immediately after. Faust watched the black spread, then flicker. Cubes of his hand blinked out of existence and returned and blinked out of existence. Strange, colorful things popped up in between on his skin- erm, where his skin was _supposed_ to be, random and unrelated to anything he could think of. The square of a calendar, labeled March 14th. Half of a crystal-blue eye. A patch of pine needles. The letter G, black text, twelve-point Times New Roman.

“Viral data?” The doctor mused to himself, unconcerned about his own condition as the random, glitchy array began overtaking his hand.. “No, no, that isn’t it. Is there an exit function?”

The Backyard was pure information, it seemed there was a possibility that information could be glitched, or done improperly. All hypothetical, obviously, as were most things having to do with the damn place. Really, non-Euclidean spaces were fun on paper, but when laid out they were really just annoying and tedious. 

Faust popped his corrupting hand right off the wrist and dropped it into an interdimensional hatch. A fresh, new one sprouted from his sleeve. “So, the Backyard isn’t a fan of your data. I’d think a natural resident would know how to react to such a thing. Were you just visiting?”

Faust knew he was talking to himself. He did that a lot. It helped him think and debug. Debug, debug. There had to be plenty of bugs, he just couldn’t spot where. Bugs in the functions somewhere, perhaps? But he still couldn’t believe a Backyard resident wouldn’t be immune to that. Unless they really _weren’t_ from the Backyard, but then how would they have been able to enter in the first place? Those two forms of data were incompatible, basically completely different languages-

Ahh! He understood now. To withstand the force of all that raw data without being immediately obliterated, there must have been some translation into another kind of data more compatible with the Backyard, something more abstract. Now that they’d been unceremoniously dumped back into the normal world, the data still had yet to be converted back properly. The concept was astounding, if morbid. Valentines must have had their data converted in a similar way, he had never encountered an existence of pure, untranslated Backyard energy. Then again, that probably wasn’t supposed to be possible anyway, seeing the state of them. This couldn’t have been normal, it seemed chunks had just been deleted right off their body haphazardly, with no real regard for what organs people needed. Contrary to popular belief, organs did have a use aside from looking pretty and playing music on.

Faust nodded at his own conclusion. “You’re an inside-out book that hasn’t translated right! No wonder you’re in pieces.”

Exercising far more caution the second time around, he touched the uncorrupted skin and turned their head to the side. The environment around them was still partly abstract, but at least it could hold a tangible form. This one seemed to have absorbed a heavy amount of pure information, mutating, malforming like the cells of an irradiated patient. But that was still the Backyard’s translation, a real chop-job. If he could translate the frequencies and fully played them out, maybe it would make the body render properly.

“Let’s see...I’m no conductor, but I still know my magical frequencies! Rest easy, my friend, I’m sure I’ll have this all sorted in a jiffy!”

As a trial run, he decided to focus on one of the leg stumps. It was one of the easier parts to toy with the coding, not much in the way of major organs to accidentally calcify or displace. Just lines and lines of skin, neat layouts of bone and muscle, aaaand- !

Faust was shocked by a sudden spray of blood. The sight of it made him freeze like a startled animal. Blood!? That wasn’t supposed to happen! Where was the leg?! He had programmed a leg!

And yet, no leg. Where there had been that inexplicable black barrier was now a gushing stump.

“Stop it!” Shouted Faust, with a trill of fear in his tone. Who was he yelling at? He wasn’t entirely sure. He was panicking. How could he make all the blood go away?! He couldn’t lose her again he couldn’t lose her again he couldn’t lose-

He frantically attempted to execute his coding over and over again, maybe it had just been a glitch, maybe he had mistyped. The black nothing scabbed over the stump, but now their side was bleeding, then the bleeding was gone but now they had two faces again. At some point in his panic he’d managed to translate their vocal chords, but the warbled screams of pain and confusion and terror were somehow worse than the staticky feedback from before.

This was roadside medicine and patchwork translation sloppily stitched together, and just as quickly falling apart at the seams. Faust wasn’t used to feeling like this, he was supposed to _thrive_ on the peculiar, but this wasn’t funny anymore. He couldn’t make a joke capable of printing out perfectly healthy limbs or removing the horrible nausea from his guts.

It had to be sheer dumb luck he wasn’t left spellcasting over a mangled corpse. A few new blacked-out patches, but no more blood. No more blood.

He stared at his patient with hollow eyes. They’d gone quiet, either from their voice being glitched away again or from them simply being too exhausted to scream anymore. They had an equal vacantness in their eye, staring off into the abstract forest. As Faust watched, he saw a single tear escape and trace the angular gouge that had eaten up their cheek.

“No, no, please don’t.” He whispered, pleaded. “Please.”

The tarp unfurled without him really thinking about it. It wasn’t soft, but it felt less invasive to wrap them up first. At least he could provide some sort of dignity. That was something people tended to get wrong about doctors. Their work was invasive, even humiliating at times, but there was still an imperative to give patients some dignity.

Faust didn’t feel especially dignified, himself. He almost would have preferred it if they pushed him away in disgust, for being a useless doctor who couldn’t manage anything properly. But they were completely unresponsive to being picked up and dragged into his lap, only continuing to stare off at nothing. Faust traced the black crags on their face.

“I can fix it.” He said, feeling where the flesh cut off into nothing.

“I can fix it.” He said, █atching the s█ares of black and nonsense begin to consu█e the edges of the tarp.

“I can fix it.” █e said█ watching t█e tips █f his fingers █lit█h and w█rp.

█“I can █ix it.” H█ s██d, █e█lin█ h█s mi█d █oi█g fu██y█

“█ ca█ f██ █t.” ██ █a██, b█t █e ██ l█ng██ be█ie███ i██

██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████


End file.
